Mexicanism Russian Style

2020 ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
K. Mitchell Snow
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
World War ◽  
Diego Rivera ◽  
Mexican Art ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Ballets Russes

The influence of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes saturated the artistic environment inhabited by Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro in Paris before World War I. In predecessors to the debates surrounding nationalism in Mexico, Diaghilev explored its intersections with folk art in the pages of his magazine Mir iskusstva. Montenegro studied with Diaghilev ally Hermen Anglada who urged his disciples to use elements from their nation’s folklore to escape the hegemony of Parisian modernism. Although Rivera disparaged the Ballet Russes’s influence on Mexican art, he painted his “Mexican trophy,” a cubist Zapatista landscape with a prominent serape, in response to an exhibit of Russian folk art that had been inspired by the success of Diaghilev’s dance company. Montenegro also cited this exhibition as one of the major influences in his decision to pursue Mexican folk art as a source of inspiration.

Nijinsky, Vaslav (1889–1950)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Järvinen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
World War ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Vaslav Nijinsky ◽  
New Research ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps

Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian dancer and choreographer of Polish descent. He achieved international renown as the star of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes Company between 1909 and 1916. A dancing prodigy, Nijinsky was lauded as the best male dancer of his generation. From 1912 onwards, his choreographic modernism inaugurated the use of simpler movement language that de-emphasized virtuosity with L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), Jeux (1913), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) and the little-known Till Eulenspiegel (1916), created during the company’s second North American tour. Nijinsky refocused attention on the choreographer as the author of dance, which had great influence on how dance as an art form was understood and discussed after World War I. Because Nijinsky was institutionalized for mental illness in 1919, none of his choreographies survived intact and were, for decades, considered artistically irrelevant. This attitude began to change in the late 1980s, when new research and reconstructions of Nijinsky’s choreographies helped scholars and audiences to rethink his place in dance history, and his works are now considered to be important examples of modernism as well as precursors to both contemporary ballet and contemporary dance, more generally.

Mercé y Luque, Antonia Rosa (Stage Name: La Argentina; b. 4 September 1888, Buenos Aires, Argentina; d. 18 July 1936, Bayonne, France)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ninotchka Bennahum
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
World War ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
School Of Music ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Subject

Antonia Rosa Mercé y Luque, known by her stage name La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Greatly influenced by the modernist productions of the Ballets Russes who sought political refuge in neutral Spain during World War I, La Argentina fused the modernism of the Spanish School of Music to the Escuela Bolera, or Spanish Bolero School of classical dance, adding many rhythmic and choreographic stylizations from Romani flamenco and other complex regional styles of folk dance she had learned on ethnographic trips throughout Spain. This hybrid vision resulted in a polyrhythmic, African and Hispano-Arab-Sephardic fusion of musical and choreographic cultures whose artistic influence can still be felt along the Iberian Peninsula. With this rich and varied musical and choreographic vocabulary, and a full company of Romani, Spanish, and European dancers and musicians, La Argentina took Europe, the Americas and Asia by storm. Between her first tour to New York in 1915 and her final European performances in 1936, she introduced and cultivated global audiences by performing, touring, writing, publishing and giving afternoon lectures on the subject of the Spanish dance,

The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

Experiment ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 214-230
Author(s):  
Linda Nochlin
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Ballets Russes

Abstract “The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde” deals with the complex relationship between Diaghalev and the members of the Parisian avant-garde he commissioned to design sets and costumes for his productions after World War I. Despite their previous aesthetic radicalism, such artists as Gris and Derain were obliged to rein in their vanguard originality and produce work of surprising conservatism, at the urging of the impresario. Matisse attempted greater originality, but in an unsuccessful ballet. The only really avant-garde production sponsored by Diaghalev after the war was Parade, in which such luminaries as Picasso, Satie and Cocteau played a leading role. Yet ultimately, it was not Diaghalev but Rolf de Mare’s Ballet Suedois that created the most experimental productions involving dance: Relache and Entr’acte. Yet, in experimenting with new forms, de Mare, in effect, abandoned ballet for different forms of expression relying on cinematic techniques rather than classical dance.

An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics

Ted Shawn ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 75-152
Author(s):  
Paul A. Scolieri
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World War ◽  
Interpersonal Conflicts ◽  
National Geographic ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Ted Shawn ◽  
American Modern Dance ◽  
Race Betterment

This chapter examines the formation and early years of Denishawn, the first American modern dance company and school. It argues that the newlywed Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn harnessed the cultural fascination with eugenics—the science of race betterment—to catapult their unique brand of theatrical dancing into public renown. A cultural phenomenon, Denishawn appeared in magazines from National Geographic to Vogue, fast becoming a sensation among Hollywood directors, vaudeville producers, and high society elites. Denishawn’s meteoric rise was curtailed by World War I and Shawn’s enlistment in the army as well as the interpersonal conflicts between St. Denis and Shawn, which led the couple to seek marriage counseling from Havelock Ellis, a pioneer of the British eugenics movement, while in London in 1922 with their company.

Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova (1881–1962)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Parton
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes

One of the most talented and prolific of 20th-century Russian artists, Natalia Goncharova was not only a leading member of the Russian avant-garde in the years before World War I but also achieved widespread recognition afterwards for her work as a stage designer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. As a painter she was a leading exponent of neo-primitivism but subsequently engaged in abstraction and Rayonism, becoming one of the first non-objective artists in Russia.

From the Other Shore: Russian Comment on Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley J. Rabinowitz
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
English Translation ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right ◽  
First Time

Among the many and varied critical responses to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, two Russian voices have not been heard in the West – Akim Volynskii's (on the right) and Anatolii Lunacharskii's (on the left). The former, Petersburg-based ballet critic from 1911 to 1925, followed the Russian Seasons with anxious dismay as so many stars of the Mariinskii Theatre departed for Paris; the latter, Soviet Russia's Commissar for Enlightenment between 1917 and 1929, witnessed Diaghilev's enterprise first-hand – both before World War I and after – and wrote about it with a mixture of admiration and class-conscious disapproval. These critics’ observations are offered in English translation for the first time.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

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